Earth hung before them, a soiled brown ball swirled around with dingy clouds. Its moon had an atmosphere, too, if that yellowish soup could be called air.

“What have they done to it?” someone whispered.

Brown oceans, brown air—it was a planet drowned in swill. But incredibly, there was life there. The planet was thick with life, in fact, to judge by all the microwave radiation, the chemical pollutants revealed by infrared spectra, the hydrocarbons that choked the clouds, the orbital junk.

“There are simply too many of them,” Jun Davd said sadly. “A population of half a trillion if we've estimated their demographics correctly from that ... city."

Radar imaging had exposed a spongelike warren of habitation that stretched from end to end of the single sprawling continent—an irregular heap of stacked cubes that staggered miles high in places, reaching to where the filthy air thinned to the merely fetid.

The radar imaging had sparked a lot of controversy. There was a strong feeling that the close-up look at Earth should be limited to passive observation—radio eavesdropping, infrared, and the like. But Yggdrasil was a naked-eye object by now, and further caution seemed pointless.

At any rate, the radar didn't seem to have alerted the inhabitants of the Earth-Moon system. Perhaps their own microwave background was simply too noisy. When there had been no sign that the dragonfly civilization was paying attention to them, the treeload of humans had voted to risk putting Yggdrasil into a remote orbit a hundred thousand miles out, with the fusion engine kept warmed up.

“I thought somehow it would be ... lovely,” Mim said, turning a disappointed face to Bram. “Like the Father World seen from space."

Alis Tonia Atli, now a historian, was among the people who had come crowding into the observatory. “Is it possible that they inherited this? Evolved for it?” the thin woman suggested. “Perhaps it was Original Man who poisoned Terra, millions of years ago. We know he had a population in the billions."

“No, it wasn't Original Man that did this,” said a thick-featured man with blue-black ringlets. It was Dal, the dramatist, inspired by the diskworld finds to return to the writing of his verse plays. “Earth didn't look like this when he was still around. I remember the words of one of the lunar poets of the twenty-eighth century ... Taine, I think."

He struck a professional pose and declaimed:

Oh, fair blue world, marbled in glory,

Teach us beauty as you rise

Above our bleak horizon...

He was interrupted by Hogard, the librarian. “I don't think that's Earth at all. I know it has a large moon, but that one big land mass with its three lobes doesn't fit any of the maps I've seen."

“Continental drift,” Enry said stolidly. “Seventy-four million years of it. They came together in one supercontinent."

“The rest of the system doesn't fit, either,” Hogard said stubbornly. “Where are the gas giants? The solar system was supposed to have four of them, including one with spectacular rings. Instead, those orbits are occupied with a whole collection of terrestroid planets, all of them crawling with dragonflies."

Jun Davd stepped in. “We know that the moon was terraformed with carbon dioxide from Venus and hydrogen from Jupiter. Carbon dioxide broken down to liberate oxygen, hydrogen reacting with some of the oxygen to make water. We can assume that the process went on. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen are very useful commodities for an industrial society expanding into space. Jupiter and Venus were gradually stripped. Both became habitable. Venus, with the crushing load of its hothouse atmosphere removed and a modest helping of hydrogen brought in to react with liberated oxygen to make oceans—and perhaps even an infusion of cometary ice. And Jupiter—"

“Jupiter stripped down to its rocky core,” Bram said in a flash of insight. “But more important, with that terrible pressure released, the shell of metallic hydrogen surrounding the core could've changed state and boiled off. Which would have removed Jupiter's magnetic field. And with it, the deadly radiation belt that Jovians have."

Jun Davd nodded approvingly at his former pupil. “Which would have made the moons of Jupiter habitable."

“Five new worlds,” the stocky playwright, Dal, said. “The four large moons plus Jupiter itself. All the real estate Original Man could have used. Seven, counting Mars and Venus. That bears me out. Original Man was not responsible for that stinking stew down there!"

He gestured vehemently at the observation window, where the blotched brown world floated against the cleanliness of space.

“No, they have abused their legacy most grieviously,” murmured Jun Davd. “Original Man once had a ring city and linked synchronous satellites draped around the waist of his lovely world, did you know that?"

There were oohs and ahs from the visitors. While Jun Davd explained, Bram turned his attention to the most interesting of the holographic displays that had been set up around the observatory—the one produced by gravitational imaging. It showed a tangled belt of overgrown wreckage around the equator of the slowly revolving planet, The buried debris must have been millions of years old. It made ridges in the sea floor, a single straight line of low hills across the land. The devastation when it crashed must have been inconceivable. Perhaps it had been the planetary disaster that had cleared an evolutionary path for the ascent of the rat-people.

Hogard was still insistent. “Okay, there are five rocky worlds doing a complicated dance around one another where Jupiter ought to be. But what about the other three gas giants this system is supposed to have? Did Original Man strip them, too?"

“No!” Mim cried with sudden heat. “I've seen the pictures of Saturn's rings! Human beings never would have done that to her!"

Bram followed her gaze to the long gallery wall of planetary images that Jun Davd had put on display. It was a selection made from the hundreds that had been taken while Yggdrasil plunged through the Sol system. The one that upset Mim showed a grim, yellow-stained ball of rock where a scummy ocean lapped at a tarnished shore. Yggdrasil had passed within a million miles of it. Even at that distance one could distinguish the scab of habitation that covered much of the land surface.

“I agree, Mim,” Jun Davd said. “Perhaps the rat-people did that. Saturn was the next world out. They may not have had our sense of aesthetics."

“Atmospheric mining is simple in principle,” Bram said. “A satellite in low orbit with a couple of hundred miles of siphon suspended beneath it. The vacuum of space operates the siphon. The orbit has to be readjusted every once in a while to compensate for atmospheric drag on the hose, but there's plenty of reaction mass available to do it with. The rat-people could have mined their hydrogen that way and had another planet available after Saturn was sucked dry."

“Eight planets,” Jun Davd said. “Of Saturn's satellites, seven are more than three hundred miles in diameter—including one moon as big as Mercury—and the dragonflies are using them all."

“That wasn't enough for them,” Bram said grimly. “We've detected dragonfly broadcasts from the leftover cores of what must have been Uranus and Neptune—and all of their moons that we were able to get any separation on."

“They're breeders!” Dal blazed. “Any piece of rock big enough for them to light on!"

“Yes, indeed,” Jun Davd agreed. “Our resident sociobiologist, Heln Dunl-mak, tells me that she estimates the total dragonfly population of Sol system to be more than ten trillion."

The figure was mind-boggling—too big to grasp. Bram heard the gasps around him.

“And they're pushing outward,” Jun Davd went on. “If the diskworld system of Delta Pavonis represents their present limit of expansion, then they now occupy a volume of space forty light-years in diameter."

He was about to go on, when an alarm went off. He picked up an interphone and listened briefly. He reached out and switched on a display. “Yes, yes, I see them now,” he said.

He put down the interphone set and faced the circle of suddenly quiet people. “That was Smeth,” he said. “Our sensors have detected the firing of launch vehicles. It appears that the dragonflies have decided that Yggdrasil is a likely-looking piece of real estate."

Bram watched through the scope as a pattern of orange sparks rose above the brown curve of the atmosphere and died out one at a time.

“End of boost phase,” Jun Davd said from his console a few feet away. “I make that eighty-four vehicles, launched from twelve separate locations."

“Eighty-four!” Bram exclaimed, remembering the colony-size environmental bubbles that had tried to settle in Yggdrasil's branches in the diskworld system. “So many for a target our size?"

“These are relatively small multistage vehicles,” Jun Davd said. He put a computer-enhanced image on the big screen so that everybody could see it. Bram saw a flecked bottle shape with a pinched waist jiggling at the approximate center of the field. Glowing green lines showed where the computer had used its imagination to fill in the outline.

“Designed to come up through atmosphere, with a final stage carrying no more than fifty or a hundred passengers, from its size. Probably their regular Earth-Moon bus. Their numbers, I assume, reflect those they happened to have standing by in a state of near-launch readiness. Yggdrasil is a target of opportunity. A new world that appeared suddenly out of the miraculous plenum."

Somebody said, “Don't they have shuttles?"

“No, these are throwaway vehicles,” Jun Davd said. “Typical of them."

On the screen, the bottle shape divided in two at its pinched waist. Bram looked through his scope again and saw a fresh shower of sparks.

“Their parking orbit didn't last very long,” Jun Davd said. “Not long enough, really, to qualify as a parking orbit at all. They hardly bother to calculate, do they—just eyeball it."

The minutes crawled by as the blanket of sparks moved perceptibly against the murky face of the planet, then slowed, then stopped moving and seemed to hover there. Jun Davd had removed the isolated ship from the big screen and replaced it with the wide view for the benefit of his visitors. What they were seeing was not strictly an honest telescopic image but one enriched by infrared, gravitational sensors, and synthetic aperture radar.

Then the sparks went out.

“Final velocity of somewhat over a hundred thousand miles an hour,” Jun Davd said. “They've done very well on their hydrocarbons and oxygen. They don't appear to have injected themselves into Yggdrasil orbit. They're going to try for a direct landing."

The visitors waited in silence, trying to make sense out of the dancing dots on the screen. But there was really nothing to see except the background planet.

A voice on the edge of hysteria finally said, “Aren't we going to do something?"

“We're going to have weight very soon,” Jun Davd said soothingly. “I suggest that everyone orient themselves toward the floor."

The floaters drifted to upright positions. People used walls and handholds to nudge themselves into foot contact as best as possible.

Bram felt returning weight: a few ounces at first, then a steadily increasing poundage. Smeth had gotten the fusion engine going in record time.

Yggdrasil groaned and creaked with the stresses of acceleration. The tree didn't like this at all. It had come into this system under its own power—the ramjet having been shut down at about one hundred astronomical units—and finished the last seven percent of braking with its lightsails. It had broken out of its hyperbola and taken up its present orbit under the hormonal and mechanical inveigling of its human passengers, and it was just settling down to enjoy the sunlight only to be subjected to the rude yank of the tether again.

Slowly, the tree began to outdistance the gnats that were pursuing it. The one-hundred-thousand-mile orbit straightened out into a larger curve. The pursuing craft were in no danger from the photon exhaust yet, but they would be when their interception trajectory intersected the line where Yggdrasil had been.

After an hour, when the tree had built up a velocity of twenty miles a second and it became obvious that the gap would continue to widen, radar showed that the dragonfly landing stages had simultaneously flip-flopped.

“Now, why would they do that?” Bram asked.

“I'm afraid I know,” Jun Davd said.

The answer came a moment later. Once again, a cloud of orange sparks twinkled into life. The burn lasted for several minutes, then extinguished.

“They used their retrorockets to give themselves an extra boost!” Bram said unbelievingly. “There's no way they can come to a soft landing on the Moon, now! All they can hope to do is—"

“Crash into Yggdrasil,” Jun Davd finished for him. “Project our delta-vee and gamble that by the time they intersect our path, the angle will be acute enough and the relative velocity close enough to zero to enable them to survive the crash.” His face was somber. “They don't care about being able to get back, of course."

Bram scrambled for a console and punched out figures, while Mim watched him, biting her lip in apprehension. After a bad couple of minutes, he gave her a reassuring smile and turned to Jun Davd.

“They can't catch up to us,” he said.

A general sigh of relief went through the observatory, though anxiety still showed on many faces.

Jun Davd said, “No, an eye—even a wondrous thing like a dragonfly eye—isn't a computer. Orbital interceptions can be misleading. But they had to try. It seems to be an imperative with them. Spread their wings, figuratively speaking—the wings they haven't got—and set out for new worlds. Nature can be profligate. It doesn't matter if most don't survive."

Something like pity appeared on Mim's face. “Can they be rescued, Jun Davd?"

“I doubt that the lunar dragonflies would care to make the effort,” Jun Davd said. “Their territory's overcrowded as it is. In any case, the question is immaterial."

It took another hour to demonstrate that. Jun Davd slid back the cover of the observation well in the floor. It gave a good view backward along their line of flight, between the twin puffs of foliage and foliated root. The people in the observatory crowded around the safety rail and stared downward.

Jun Davd fiddled with dials, and the tough, transparent membrane became a magnifying lens. The expanse of tree crown fled past in a blur as the focus came to rest somewhere beyond. Filters masked the glare of the caged sun, spitted on the slender shaft of the probe; the darkened circle of eclipse also made bearable the beam of virtual photons, briefly swollen with abnormal energy by a factor of ten billion before it satisfied quantum theory by decaying into pions.

The swarm of dragonfly vehicles peppered the view. They were harshly lit on the side facing the hadronic beam, and their shape could be clearly seen as squat bells, with the spent cone of the descent engine for a clapper.

“No way they can stop,” Jun Davd said. “Nor can we."

The beam was very tight, but there was a certain amount of scattering. To the watching humans, it seemed that each bell instantly evaporated while still some distance away. One by one, they flicked out of existence, soaked up by the terrible light.

In minutes, space was swept clean of the glittering cloud.

“We're safe,” Dal said. “Let's get out of this cursed system."

He spoke too soon. Yggdrasil's straightening course was taking it past the Moon. It lay before them, huge and yellow through the grand observation blister that formed one wall, Through sulfurous wisps of clouds could be seen a landscape of round lakes, patches of sparse unhealthy vegetation, pocked scars softened by weather, oily seas dotted with ring islands that had once been craters.

And popping up through the murky atmosphere was a shower of orange sparks.

An alarm went off. Jun Davd picked up the interphone, said “I see them,” and hung up.

Bram was already busy at the computer touch board. Jun Davd leaned over his shoulder to see what he was entering, nodded approval, and started feeding in supplementary data from the tree's sensors.

“What can they hope to accomplish?” Bram whispered when the answer appeared on the screen. “At best they've matched roughly for our present velocity. Those vehicles could be waiting for us in our projected flight path if we stopped accelerating in the next decihour. But we're still boosting. They'll only end up behind us, like the others, and get themselves vaporized in our drive exhaust."

“Then they must expect us to stop accelerating,” Jun Davd said.

“Missiles,” exclaimed Alis Tonia Atli, then had to explain the specialized meaning of the word from her knowledge of twentieth-century earth history.

“No,” Jun Davd said. “We'd have seen them by now. At any rate, they wouldn't do much better at catching us than those piloted craft. It has to be something faster."

“A fusion exhaust,” said Dal. “Remember how reckless they were with it around the diskworld? They might not quail at using it this close to home. And they might not realize Yggdrasil's combustible. If all they want to do is kill the probe and stop us, they. wouldn't mind turning us into a ball of slag. We'd be another moon to settle on—bigger than most of those they use."

“There's nothing the size of their interstellar ship in orbit,” Jun Davd said. “I'm sure they launch them as soon as they make them. The largest objects I see in orbit are those bulky cylindrical structures attached to mirrors—” He stopped.

“Light,” Bram said. “Light would be fast enough."

Jun Davd looked shaken. “I thought they had something to do with solar power. I can see that even now we don't fully understand these creatures. They've mounted laser defenses against unwanted colonization by their brethren on Earth."

Even as he spoke, the laser beams struck Yggdrasil. There was a flickering of images on the big screen as some of the antennae elements dispersed across Yggdrasil's crown burned out, then the computer redistributed data to compensate. Bram saw the beams, hundreds of them, sending their threads of light through space in a complex skein that focused on Yggdrasil. The computer had assigned different colors to the threads to distinguish the types of lasers—violet, red, blue, green, magenta, and a deadly gray to represent x-rays.

One of the visitors went into hysterics, a little round man who was calmed by two women and given a glass of water.

Bram reached for the interphone before he remembered that he was no longer year-captain. He turned to Jun Davd. “Somebody should get Enyd to rotate the tree—distribute the heat absorption. Even though we're boosting, another few percent of g wouldn't—"

“We needn't bother,” Jun Davd said. “We couldn't get rotation started fast enough. Besides..."

He trailed off, looking thoughtful.

The tree continued to accelerate. One of the women with the hysterical man said soothingly, “See, we're still going."

“The sensitive part of the ramjet shaft's in the umbrage of the leaves at this angle,” Jun Davd said. “And as for the leaves themselves, our sensors haven't yet detected any fires."

He was trying to suppress a smile. He gave up the effort and let his long face split in a big grin.

Bram took the call from Smeth when it came. He listened briefly, then hung up and addressed the expectant throng.

“Smeth wanted to warn us that we're all a few pounds heavier—but I'm sure you've all noticed that already. The laser beams are giving us a small additional boost—enough to take a little of the load off the ramjet and turn more of its work into acceleration."

A few of the people looked puzzled. Bram drew a breath and said, “Yggdrasil thrives on light. Up to and including x-rays—the Nar found space trees happily in orbit around x-ray stars."

He added his own grin to Jun Davd's. “When Yggdrasil felt things getting a little too hot, it turned its leaves reflective side out, in the lightsail mode. The dragonflies will take a while to realize it, but they're helping to speed us out of their system."

An hour later, they watched the second fleet of dragonfly ships fall into the consuming flame of the drive beam. Long before then, the lasers had been switched off.

As Yggdrasil sped past the orbit of the planet that had been called Pluto, Jun Davd sought Bram out during an intermission at one of Edard's concerts. It was a Tenday later, and life in the tree was returning to normal. “The next time we meet them,” Jun Davd said, “they may be more advanced."

“Then we'll have to go far enough to be sure we won't meet them,” Bram said.

Jun Davd did not reply directly. “Trist is looking for volunteers to help repair the antenna system,” he said.

“What's the hurry? We don't have a Message to broadcast anymore."

“No. But we'd better start listening."

Seven years of listening had taken their toll on Trist. He had the same ready smile, the same willingness to banter. But his ice-blue eyes had acquired something of the haunted look that Bram remembered from the years when Trist had monitored the spread of Nar civilization through the Whirlpool galaxy—until the wave of radiation from the exploding core had put a stop to the radio emissions forever.

Trist had monitored the Nar emissions for fifty thousand years. He had listened to the spread of dragonfly civilization for only fifty-odd years—about seven years in terms of tree time. But his eyes had aged at the same rate as the outside universe, Bram thought.

Trist looked up from his console as Bram entered the control booth. The Message Center had been stripped of its library over the centuries, as the archivists had gradually integrated its contents with the growing central databank. But its equipment—the leaning stacks of power and control elements that made long avenues down the cylindrical cavity—had been left intact and placed at the service of the astronomy department.

“They've reached Aldebaran now,” he said before Bram could speak.

“Red giant,” Bram said, searching his memory. “With a companion."

“It's a white dwarf now,” Trist said. “The dragonflies have settled both components. They're not very fussy. Outer planets of the dwarf would be pretty cold but that wouldn't bother the kind of creatures who settled Pluto. Any inner planets, if they survived the red giant phase and resolidified, wouldn't be much more habitable. Airless slagballs."

“How far?” Bram asked.

“About sixty light-years from Sol. It was one of the stars that stayed in the same neighborhood."

A crawling sensation went down Bram's spine. “Their technology's improving. They're spreading outward at about half the speed of light."

Trist nodded. “Since we first met them at Delta Pavonis, the sphere of space they occupy has grown to a diameter of nearly one hundred twenty light-years. At this rate, it will take them only two hundred thousand years to overrun the entire galaxy."

“Jun Davd said that we could flee to the opposite ends of the Milky Way and find them waiting for us."

“If they learn how to attain relativistic speeds any time in the next few centuries, yes.” Trist was gloomy. “And if they don't, they could come calling fairly soon, anyway."

“The nearest large galaxy is two million light years away. Andromeda, former man called it.” Bram swallowed hard as he remembered the first breathtaking sight he'd had of the Milky Way's sister galaxy, centuries ago, as a child at the observatory with Voth. “At one g, we could be there in thirty years, our time."

“Two million years, dragonfly time,” Trist said. “Plenty of time for them to invent relativistic ramjets. And improve on them."

“Yes,” Bram said. “And intergalactic beacons that broadcast their genetic code. They're already in possession of the prototype."

“We're using frozen Nar technology for the most part,” Trist said. “We won't have a better intergalactic machine till we've settled down somewhere, expanded our population, developed an industrial-based society—"

“While the dragonflies have had two million years to develop theirs."

Trist spoke with a sort of controlled terror. “Long before then, they'll have swallowed the entire Milky Way. Trillions of them around every G-type and K-type star. Billions, maybe, around less hospitable stars ... And ... two hundred billion stars! Two hundred billion separate dragonfly civilizations, all of them competing to be the first for the next leap outward."

“Jun Davd was right,” Bram said. “All they have to do is to learn to crowd the speed of light by one decimal place better than we can."

He turned to listen for a moment to the speakers, which were pouring out a torrent of dragonfly clicks and snaps from whatever lumps of rock were in orbit around Aldebaran and its companion. When he spoke again, it was half to himself.

“There's no place we can go in the entire universe where we'd be safe from them. No place at all."

Both of them listened to the clicks for a while. Then Trist spoke. “You'd better call a ship's meeting."

“I'm not year-captain."

Trist showed rare exasperation. “Oh, for Fatherbeing's sake, by the time we get Smeth to do it and wait for him to sort out all the ifs, buts, and maybes, the dragonfly sphere will be another fifty light-years across!"

“I'll post a notice in the datanet,” Bram said.

“I say we go back!” the man on the holo stage bleated. “Go back and sterilize all their worlds with our engine exhaust! All of them, down to the smallest asteroid! That's the only way we'll ever be safe?

He was a narrow-faced man with an incongruously thick and muscular neck sticking up out of protective coveralls, and his voice was shrill with fear.

“Who is he?” Bram whispered to Trist in the seat next to him.

“Name's Perc. He's one of Smeth's technicians. Fusion specialist, I think. Big talker—always trying to organize the black gang, whatever that means. He's always at loggerheads with Smeth."

“The way to do it,” Perc blathered on, “is to start back far enough to build up a tremendous gamma factor. Build up enough relativistic mass so that we devastate them by gravitational effects, too, just to make sure. But the main thing about going in at relativistic speeds is that we can flash by in fractions of a second, before they have time to react. They might not even realize we were there, in fact. To them it would just seem as if the surface of their planets just sizzled and went up in flame."

“Ferocious, isn't he?” Bram said.

“He's just frightened,” Mim said. “We all are."

“He's one of the post-Milky Way generation,” Nen said, leaning across Trist. “Have you noticed how all of the really bloodcurdling comments tonight came from the new people?"

Mim nodded agreement. “It's hard for those of us who were raised among the Nar to think of a life form—any life form—as being a threat."

“We're learning,” Bram said grimly.

“Oh, my dear, yes,” Mim said, reaching blindly for Bram's hand. She seemed on the verge of bursting into tears; she might have been remembering the long vigil when Bram had failed to return to the tree with the evacuees. But it took her only a moment to recover her usual spunk. “That was another time, another universe."

Perc's outside holo image was waving its mammoth arms around. “Just one quick pass over each planet,” Perc said earnestly and reasonably. “We needn't go into a polar orbit that would cover the entire surface—and we couldn't, anyway, with the kinetic energy of relativistic speeds. Our exhaust would boil away the crust—melt a channel of slag from pole to pole. Split the planet like a rotten fruit. Turn the oceans to steam and strip away the atmosphere. Nothing could survive—not anywhere. And think of Yggdrasil's mass at seventy—or seven hundred—gamma. We'd rip them apart! I move that we start back at once. Burn them out. Descend on them like an avenging angel. Bring them their time of fire."

The holo lurched off the stage, and the little man who had cast it seated himself again. Smeth thanked Perc for his views as if it hurt his teeth, then gaveled down the uproar that started.

“Jun Davd, I think you wanted to make a comment, he said.

Jun Davd's holo rose, courteous and grave, and looked down at the audience. “There's no doubt that we could wipe out planets if we had a mind to do so,” he said. “But I'm afraid that for us to exterminate the entire dragonfly race is a mathematical impossibility. You can't make U-turns in space, and by the time we backed up far enough for a second run—decelerated and built up gamma again—years would have passed. We'd have to do that for every single planetary body ... divided, perhaps, by a factor of three or four for those we could align, of course. In Sol system, there are thirty-five inhabited bodies of fair size, plus an unknown number of asteroids, cometary nuclei, and possibly space habitats. We could not be sure of ... sterilizing ... them all. And if we could, there still would be numbers of dragonfly vehicles in transit within the system, ready to settle on some of the cooling cinders after we passed."

A babble of voices broke out. Smeth pounded his gavel, and Jun Davd went on.

“And, of course, we're not talking about only one system. There are approximately one thousand five hundred stars and multiple star systems within a sixty-five-light-year radius of Sol. Most of them, by the evidence of Trist's radio survey, are inhabited. Even if we spent only five or ten objective years dealing with each, it would be millennia before we finished the task."

He paused. The hall of the tree had gone silent.

“And by then, the dragonfly sphere of habitation would have grown to a diameter of at least fifteen thousand light-years."

“Then you're saying that we can't keep up with their expansion?” shouted a man in the front row.

Smeth tried to gavel him out of order, but Jun Davd bent forward to reply. His holo loomed like a cloud over the first ten rows, but it was the man in front whom he addressed.

“We'd have to disinfect every star in the galaxy. And then we'd have to start all over again."

There was a clamor of competing voices, and Smeth granted the stage to a woman who wanted to be assured that flight was not entirely hopeless. “Can't we find just one little star they won't want—where they'll leave us alone? Somewhere between the galaxies where they wouldn't find us?"

“Where's Jao?” Bram whispered to Trist. “I don't see him up there. I thought he had something he wanted to contribute to this."

“The last I heard, he was still working on some calculations. He has a computer model he wants to stir some more figures into."

“What good will that do?” Nen said angrily. “Words, numbers—what difference will any of it make?"

“It's something he's been cooking up with Jun Davd,” Trist said. “All I know is that they think it has some bearing on the present situation."

On the platform, Smeth was trying to stem further discussion and bring the proceedings to some kind of conclusion. The company had been at this for hours now, everything had been said at least twice, and people were getting cranky and tired.

“The time's come for us to make a decision,” Smeth said harshly. “We have a problem that can't be solved. But we've got to choose a course of action, nonetheless. Put quite simply, do we fight, run, or hide? Or pretend it isn't so? I don't believe I've heard any other suggestions tonight. So if anybody wants to start making motions, I'll put them on the board and we can—"

The ushers were already starting to move down the aisles to get into position with their long-handled ballot boxes, when a burly figure dragging a bulky piece of electronic equipment shouldered his way past them.

“Hold it, Smeth!"

Smeth's face showed annoyance. “The discussion just closed, Jao. There's nothing more left to say. Take a seat with the others."

Jun Davd leaned over to whisper something in Smeth's ear. A slice of his face appeared in the holo projection, but the words weren't audible.

“All right,” Smeth said. “Have your say. But try not to hold things up."

Jao climbed to the stage with his gear and started plugging light fibers into the exposed holo panel while the projectionist hovered nearby. He said something to the projectionist, who nodded and took over the task while Jao strode to the lectern. A gigantic red-bearded face, disembodied, hovered over the auditorium; he hadn't bothered with the niceties when he made his rough-and ready connections.

“When we dropped into the nucleus of the Milky Way from above the galactic plane about fifty of our years ago,” Jao began without preamble, “we saw a peculiar sight. It was a sort of arc of hot gas rising up out of the core at right angles to where you'd expect it to be for a galactic magnetic field."

The audience stirred restively at what seemed to be an astronomy lecture coming when everybody was wound up with tension and ready to release it in the form of group action.

Jao appeared not to notice. The suspended face cocked a gigantic red eyebrow and went blithely on. “We postulated that something at the center of the galaxy was acting like a stupendous dynamo. The obvious candidate was a rotating black hole—the one we later used as a brake when we dived through the core."

The blank part of the holo was suddenly filled with the Milky Way, making the disembodied head appear to be cloaked in the magnificence of stars. Jao had improved on the crude animated holo of finger-painted orange lines that he had first sketched so many years ago to illustrate his theory. Now a realistic image was there, drawn from the observatory's photographic files and turned on its side to show an edge-on representation of the galaxy, with the central bulge glowing yellow.

The lines of force were still orange, though now they were an elegant computer sketch that made them flow in magnetic loops. The Milky Way tilted slightly, and now one could see the loops spinning faster around their common axis and flattening out to lie more within the galactic plane. Not all the lines of force were trapped, however. A small arclike spray still rose at the pole.

“The magnetic field was much more powerful than it ought to have been,” Jao said, “and it was growing. There was twice as much mass rotating around the galactic center as there should have been—the equivalent of two hundred million solar masses. It should have been gobbled up by the black hole, swept out by core explosions during the quasar epoch of the universe. But some process is replenishing it—maybe from a universe on the other side of the plenum."

The Milky Way spun all the way up like a coin and presented its face. Now it could be seen as a great swirl of stars with an incandescent center. Jao's holographic head presided over it like some raffish deity.

He had their attention now. The crowd had stopped fidgeting, and the background buzz of conversation had died down.

“We set up a long-term computer model at that time and started feeding data into it. The program was authorized to change its suppositions if data didn't fit. We left the model running and plunged into the galactic core. All the senses of the tree were plugged into it. It saw, it listened, it sensed radiation and magnetism and gravitation, and it drew maps covering whole slices of the galaxy as we passed through."

Shaded areas appeared briefly in the hologram to show the path swept by Yggdrasil's spiraling orbit.

“Since our brush with the black hole, the computer has been processing sixty thousand years’ worth of real-time observational data. It's a large enough sample of the history of the galaxy to show us how the charged arms grow. And to project into the past and future with the help of data from other sources. I've been awake for the last twenty hours polishing the results. And there's no possible doubt..."

Now Jao's theoretical plan of eight revolving spokes could be seen, superimposed in coruscating orange on a galaxy that was rotating at half their speed. They swept the spiral arms of stars like great flexible pinions, their ends trailing. They were growing outward all the time, becoming more vivid as they gained in power. It was very graphic.

The sun appeared as a yellow dot in the spiral arms of the galaxy, between spokes. And now one of the orange spokes brushed it.

“That happened three hundred million years ago,” Jao said. “Half of all animal families on earth were wiped out. In the oceans, ninety percent of species disappeared."

Pictures floated in the holo, superimposed on the spinning wheel. They showed queer, scaly, flipper-limbed creatures with flat heads and big jaws, armored swimmers, many-legged bottom crawlers. They had come, Bram supposed, from Ame's files.

Another orange pinion swept past Sol, then another, and another. Some of them were thick and bright, some were feeble. Some of them had not yet grown long enough to reach the yellow dot. Images of strange life forms flashed, disappeared.

“Those were the dinosaurs,” Jao went on. “They were big—bigger than our paleobiologists could believe at first, but we found bones in the diskworld museums. We'll remake those animals some day for our game preserves."

People gasped at the images: enormous armored quadrupeds with horned heads, finned backs, and spiked tails; great, plodding, thick-legged creatures with long necks, tiny heads, and massive tails; a fearsome monster with stalactite teeth and tiny front limbs rearing high and trying to smash through the eighty-foot steel fence that held it so as to get at a human zookeeper who was only as tall as its knee.

“Gone,” Jao said. “That was a major extinction. No land animal weighing more than twenty pounds survived. The little furry creatures who were humankind's ancestors were among them."

The great spoked mill continued to revolve. It had begun to subdivide again so that tenuous threads were trapped between some of the major arms, beginning their own growth.

“The extinctions come regularly now—about every twenty-six million years,” Jao's floating head said somberly. “Some large, some small. And now we have some minor extinctions caused by these trailing arms, at intervals of from twelve to fifteen million years. The new arms haven't quite settled into place yet."

A thin orange wire passed across Sol like a wand.

“Twelve million years before the heyday of Original Man,” Jao said. “Followed by the return of that first, powerful arm that wiped out half of all animal families on earth. Only this time, Original Man was the dominant species."

The audience sat stunned. In the silence, someone shouted, “I don't believe it. A technical civilization could have found some way to protect itself!"

Jao waited it out. “The rats survived in their burrows,” he finally said. “They were small, prolific. They took mankind's place. And twenty-six million years later, it was their turn."

A thick orange arm, grown in intensity since its last circuit, came around and swatted the sun.

“There was no place for them to run, even if they'd known what was coming,” Jao said. “The arms sweep the edge of the galaxy, now. They're thousands of light-years thick. An individual ship, shielded against radiation and traveling very close to the speed of light, might have been able to choose an orbit that would keep it between the advancing arm and the retreating arm till it got out of the galaxy entirely. But the rat-people weren't that advanced technologically."

The man who had previously interrupted Jao stood up and tried to speak again. Smeth nodded, and a monitor got to him with a portable pickup. His image sprang up on the bolo stage in a double exposure that made the galaxy shine through him.

“But Original Man must have been advanced enough,” he said. “Couldn't he have moved his whole population out and fled to another galaxy, leaving his beacon behind? Maybe that's the reason why the Message stopped—not man's extinction.” His eyes, magnified against the swirling stars, pleaded at them.

“I don't know,” Jao said. “With a population in the billions—maybe tens of billions ... And anyway, he might not have known what was coming. We know, because we came to Sol straight out of the galactic core. Even if they had a ramjet like ours and sent a scout to the center of the galaxy, the round trip would have been better than sixty thousand years in objective time, and by that time it might have been too late—just as it was for the Nar."

Jun Davd stepped quickly into the bolo frame and said, “Perhaps it is possible. The universe hasn't heard from Original Man since the Message was cut off, but perhaps that's because he hasn't reached refuge yet. He might have targeted a galaxy more than seventy-four million light-years away—in the Virgo cluster, for instance."

The man thanked him with grateful eyes and sat down.

Jun Davd said, with mild rebuke, “You'd better get on with it, Jao. “These people can't stand much more suspense."

Jao's holographic lips widened in a grin that was bigger than the entire central bulge of the galaxy.

“It's been twenty-six million years since the rat-people became extinct."

It took a moment for the impact of that to sink in, and then the entire hall erupted into a vast rumbling chaos. People leaped to their feet, shouting unintelligible questions at the rostrum.

Jao held up a hand that appeared in giant size beside the holo of his face and got partial silence.

“I wanted to be sure of my data before I came to this meeting. With twenty-six million years to play with, a five percent margin of leeway could have the dragonflies spilling out of this galaxy and halfway to Andromeda before the charged arm took its swipe. But that's not the case."

He grinned more broadly. “The leading edge of the next spoke is already brushing the dragonfly sector of space. We're getting radio noise from it now. It will meet the expanding dragonfly shell in less than ten thousand years. At this radius of the galaxy, it's only about eleven thousand light-years between charged arms. The dragonflies will have expanded to their limit by then, trapped between two arms."

The holo display showed the event graphically. A sphere of twinkling dots was growing outward from Sol, toward the orange barriers that fenced it in on either side. The arm swept inexorably onward, slicing the ball of lights thinner and thinner until nothing was left.

“Scrubbed clean,” Jao said. “The universe is safe from dragonflies."

The assembly went wild. Jao could not have made himself heard even if he had wanted to go on. People were weeping, laughing, embracing—showing every form of emotion. Jao stood watching for long minutes, hands on hips, then left the platform. Jun Davd took his place and waited.

People crowded around Jao as he walked down the aisle, clapping him on the back, grabbing his arm, jabbering at him. He nodded pleasantly at everyone, mouthed words against the din.

He stopped at Bram's row and crowded in to loom over everybody. “This arm that's coming,” he said. “It's grown since the last time around. It's going to make the Cretaceous extinction look like—what does Marg call them?—a tea party."

“No chance of the dragonflies surviving as a species?” Bram asked.

Jao shook his head. “Not a chance in a googol. If it doesn't get the dragonflies, it'll get what they eat. Evolution will have to start at the bottom again. There'll be breathing space of twenty-six million years. Time enough for another species to find its destiny."

Ame was there, leaning over the back of Mim's chair. She gave Mim a great-great-great-granddaughterly peck. “Maybe that species will be the Cuddlies,” she said. “They're well established on the diskworlds, and they'll have a better chance than most of surviving in their shielded burrows. They can wait out the radiation for a few millennia. They're bright little creatures, well on their way to intelligence, and their weight lies below the twenty-pound danger zone."

“Oh, Ame,” Mim said. “I hope you're right."

On the stage, Jun Davd had succeeded in getting a measure of attention. “It appears that spiral galaxies are not very healthy places to live,” he said. “They tend to have hypermasses ticking away at their centers. Binary black holes splashing into one another and causing core explosions. Leftover black holes from the quasar epoch powering galactic dynamos. Perhaps it might he better to find a smaller, more congenial neighborhood."

He must have come to the meeting prepared for this, because Jao's holo of the Milky Way suddenly started to recede into the distance. As it dwindled, the field enlarged to show the fuzzy patches of globular clusters and some small, irregular satellite galaxies. The holo zeroed in on a pair of them.

“The Clouds of Magellan are not too far from home, I think,” Jun Davd said. “The Large Magellanic Cloud is only one hundred fifty light-years away. The Milky Way would fill the sky..."

Loki and Methuselah came scampering over when Bram and Mim entered their quarters. It was past suppertime, and the two Cuddlies had firm ideas about when it was time to be fed.

Loki tried to lead Bram toward the cupboard, but Methuselah pawed at Mim's legs until she bent over and picked him up. Holding him in her arms, she frowned and said to Bram, “He's been acting a little funny the last few days. Do you think he's all right?"

“What do you mean, funny?"

“His appetite's been off. And I think his nose feels too warm."

Bram inspected the little beast. Methuselah's big brown eyes seemed as button-bright as usual. Were they a bit too bright? Bram ruffled the soft fur—brown, salted with gray. Methuselah's face seemed somehow different.

“Mim,” Bram said. “Do you think his muzzle's getting darker?"

“Let me see.” She pursed her lips. “Yes, there's less gray in it. It was almost pure white before. Some of the brown's coming back. What could make it do that?"

“I don't know. Original Man had animal doctors..."

“Well, we don't.” She gave the little creature a hug. “We're taking him to Doc Pol."

“Fourth Cuddly I've seen this Tenday,” Doc Pol said. “Marg and Orris were in with that spoiled pet of theirs just before you got here. Pesky critter nips a little too hard! Marg was carrying on. Thought her precious Mittens was at death's door."

“What was wrong with it?” Mim asked in alarm.

He looked up in annoyance. His irascibility was at odds with his boyish face and slender form. “Wrong with it? Nothing was wrong with it! It was pregnant, that's all!"

“Oh."

“Don't know what the fool woman expected, letting her pet run free like that. All the half-tame Cuddlies living in the branches. She said she thought her precious was too old—past the age of fertility."

“But that's right!” Mim said. “She wanted to mate her Mittens with our Loki ... oh, about six ship-years ago, and Mittens was past the breeding age even then."

“That so?” Doc Pol said. He raised a faunlike eyebrow. “Well, let's have a look at your little feller."

For the next ten minutes, Doc Pol poked, prodded, tapped the tiny chest, shone lights into eyes and ears, managed to insert a thermometer abaft the twitching tail, and peered down the pink throat while Methuselah tried earnestly to bite him.

At last he released the Cuddly, who immediately settled in Mim's arms, clinging with all his might.

“Well?” Bram said.

“He's picked up a virus,” Doc Pol said.

“Virus? How? What kind of virus? What could he have possibly caught?"

Doc Pol fiddled with his instruments and took his time about replying.

“Immortality,” he said. “There's a lot of it going around."

Ame set it up. “Molecular taxonomy,” she said. “The whole department's pitching in. We've got a team working on amino acid sequencing, another working on protein sequencing, and Doc Pol and his apprentices are helping us to measure the antigenic distances between humans, Cuddlies, and a number of primates whose serum albumin we've been able to clone from our diskworld biological samples. And, of course, we're doing extensive comparative anatomy studies."

“All of a sudden we're getting a rash of similar cases reported by Cuddly owners,” Bram said. “Some of the children may have spread it after getting their booster shots. Or it may have been going on a long time. People today aren't really very familiar with the concept of aging. Oh, they understand it intellectually. But it wouldn't occur to a lot of them to wonder why their pets aren't getting old."

Ame bit her lip. “We really should have gotten around to a study of the Cuddlies sooner. But there was just so much for us to wade through in all those records and the frozen molecular zoo we took away with us from the diskworld..."

“How soon?” Bram asked.

“I'll have an answer for you in a few days."

“The Cuddlies are Homo post-sapiens," Ame announced.

A wave of shock went through the chamber. A reporter for the datanet said, “You mean these little animals are Original Man?"

“We believe they're a divergent species growing out of the extinct Homo sapiens branch, yes,” Ame said.

An uproar started in the chamber. Ame looked helplessly around at her colleagues for support. She hadn't expected a mob this size when she had told datanet that she had a modest announcement to make. The announcement had had to be moved from the department's conference room to a small adjacent auditorium.

“What does that mean?” somebody demanded.

Ame faced them squarely. “It means that during the time of extinction, whatever Homo sapiens stock briefly survived on earth underwent adaptive radiation. Man himself would not have survived long, but a number of subbranches might have evolved to fit different ecological niches. The Earth would have become a very different place. Size and brainpower might not have been survival characteristics. Size certainly wasn't. There might have been back-mutations for such characteristics as tails and fur, night vision. The ancestors of the Cuddlies were among those divergent species. They were small, quick, burrowing omnivores. We know the rat-people considered them pests and tried to exterminate them. But they spread to the diskworlds as stowaways on spaceships, got into the granaries, learned to survive in pockets of trapped air. And they had millions of years after that to evolve into their present form—able to live in vacuum, to do without breathing for long periods of time, like Earth's extinct sea mammals.” She shook her head ruefully. “It was obvious that the Cuddlies were terrestroid mammals, but we failed to take the step further that would have identified them as primates."

The datanet reporter waved for attention. “Couldn't the Cuddlies be descended from some other primate? Weren't there things like monkeys and apes? Lemurs?"

Ame shook her head. “We know the Cuddlies are hominids from the comparative anatomy studies—the teeth, for instance. But more important is the amino acid and protein sequencing. Molecular analysis shows that Cuddlies are as far removed from apes and monkeys as humans are. The cytochrome c sequence in man and Cuddly is almost identical.” She paused, got some encouragement from Doc Pol, who was sitting behind her, and continued. “And there is no immunological distance at all."

“Is that why Cuddlies were able to catch the immortality virus?” asked someone else, probably a Cuddly owner.

“Yes,” Ame said. “They're our very close cousins. They're what we could become."

At the back of the auditorium, Jun Davd turned to Bram with an amused smile. “How does it feel, Bram? You brought us across thirty-seven million light-years, hoping to find Original Man, and when we found him, we made him our house pet."

“We're Original Man, though, aren't we, in a sense?” Bram said. “And if you want to look at it the way Ame just did, he's descended from us."

The datanet reporter persisted in his questions. “Are you saying that we're going to evolve into little furry animals like Cuddlies, then?"

“No,” Ame said. “Evolution doesn't repeat itself. We still have a long way to go. And so have they."

The Large Magellanic Cloud lay before them, a ruddy tiara spread across the night. From only a few tens of thousands of light-years away, it was brilliant, the teeming stars laced with torches of red fire.

“It's lovely,” Mim said, holding Bram's hand. “What a breathtaking sky we're going to live under."

“Yes, the skies will be spectacular,” Jun Davd said. “That red nebula at the end—the Tarantula, Original Man called it—will be brighter than Earth's full moon. And of course the Milky Way will be huge, and we'll see it almost head on. It will fill half the night sky—almost as large as we're seeing it now."

He switched on the rearward view for a moment to show them what he meant. The heartbreaking swirl of humankind's birthplace blazed against the darkness, a splendid pinwheel that revealed nothing of the deadly mill that was churning within her.

Bram felt the ache of its loss. “We'll be able to keep watch over it,” he said with a smile he hoped was on straight.

“Don't look so glum,” Jao boomed. “Not a dragonfly click coming from it, and it's been a hundred thousand years."

They had been fleeing for twenty-two years, ship time, and three years previously the dragonfly radio emissions had ceased—almost abruptly because of the extreme temporal condensation of the gamma factor they had built up by then. It meant that the dragonfly civilization had ceased to exist some ten to twenty thousand years after they had departed the galaxy and that, after a hundred thousand years, there was still no sign of it. For the first year of those three, Bram had lived in terror that one day Trist's listening post would pick up the clicking sounds that would mean that somewhere a dragonfly planet had survived and struggled back to the technological level again.

“You're right,” he said with returning cheer. “It's the Cuddlies’ turn now, on their diskworlds. They've got twenty-six million years to make the most of their opportunity. And who knows—before their time is up, we may even learn how to shut off galactic dynamos. In that case, we could go back and save them."

“Oh, Bram,” Mim said. “What a wonderful thought!"

“But crazy,” Jao said. “A crazy dream."

“Yes,” Bram said. “I've been told that before."

Jun Davd switched on the forward view again. The torches of the Large Cloud shone forth once more. “We'll be safe in there,” he said. “You can see there's no hypermass giving it shape. There are fifteen billion stars in there—old, young, and in-between. We ought to be able to find one small yellow star that the human race can call home."

“Amen to that,” Bram said.

He smiled at Mim and squeezed the hand clasping his. Methuselah pressed against his leg. Humans and posthumans drew closer together to share an ancient tribal comfort. They stood in sacramental silence as the living tree that bore them hurtled out of the dark toward the cloud of fire.

Epilogue

SECOND GENESIS

“Why am I different?” the little decapod said.

He was about rib-high to Bram, hardly out of babyhood, his saucer eyes disproportionately large around his waist, the undersides of his stubby tentacles still an immature mauve. Theth-theth, Bram had named him when the time had come to fish him out of the nursery pool. In the Small Language, it was a derivative of Voth. Mim had suggested the name: Little Theth.

Bram laughed and ruffled the velvety inner surface of a tentacle. He could feel the words that were trying to take shape there, gaining in form and lucidity with every passing day.

“Because I'm made of human stuff and you're made of Nar stuff,” he said tolerantly. “We've been through it before."

“Just one more time,” the small being begged.

“You want me to tell you the Story,” Bram said.

“Yes,” Theth-theth said contentedly, and snuggled up against Bram. Methuselah, trying to insert himself into the group, nestled against the little decapod's other side, making a sandwich of him, and Theth-theth stroked him with a lazy tentacle.

Bram sighed and settled back against the thick bole of the oak tree. There were oak trees now—whole forests of them—and this one was over a hundred years old. It had been planted, he remembered, the very day the bio-project to resurrect the Nar had begun.

He looked out across the wide valley, green with the grass and trees of Earth that had taken root here and flourished. A stream ran down the slopes, sparkling silver, and he could see a herd of zebra pausing to drink at one of the wide pools. The air was alive with the songs of birds.

Haven was a fair world, its contours softened by weather but barren of life until the coming of humanity. Now, after more than a century, the green cloak of vegetation was beginning to spread across the blue oceans to the other continents, and the oceans themselves were exploding with life—plankton and small fish, so far. Someday there would be whales, Bram thought.

The sky was a rich blue, piled high with fleecy white clouds. Bram could see Yggdrasil near the zenith, a bright star visible in daytime. People still lived there. Yggdrasil had scattered its seeds in the cometary belt, and other space poplars were growing there. In a couple of centuries, it would be time to harvest them; humankind would need more starships by then. The shuttles brought from the Father World were still in good repair, but a move was already afoot to start handcrafting orbital spacecraft here on Haven.

The sun overhead was warm and yellow—a perfect match for lost Sol. Jun Davd had searched long and hard before he was satisfied, and he had chosen well.

The twittering voices of children, both human and Nar, came floating on the summer breeze from somewhere close at hand. Bram turned his head and saw a group of them playing a children's game. In hide-and-seek, the Nar children were never “it"; their 360-degree vision and eyes that never closed gave them an unfair advantage. They were better at footraces, too. But the human children were better at playing catch and at such games as jacks, so it all evened out.

Some of the older human children, he saw, were wearing touch sleeves and the lightweight induction helmets that Jao's project had designed. It was a first crude step that filtered some of the touch language into the speech center of the human brain through mediation circuits. It would do for a start—human and decapod children could begin to learn the Great Language together. At this point, no Nar child in this first bioengineered crop was much older than Theth-theth.

Theth-theth tugged at Bram's arm with an encircling tentacle; Bram could feel the impatient rippling of the cilia.

“The Story!” the little decapod piped. “You promised, Bramfather!"

“Eh? I'm sorry. I must have been daydreaming. Too much lunch."

He was comfortably full and heavy from the Safepassage Day picnic; Mim had gone off to pick wild flowers with Ang and Lydis, and some of the men were playing a game of quoits in the grass, but he had not had the ambition to join them.

“The Message," the small flowerlike creature prompted. “How the race of Nar entrusted their faithful humans with it, but there was no one to receive it after the worlds ended. And—and how the humans sailed between Scylla and Charybdis, and how Yggdrasil saved the human race when the whole universe caught fire and burned up, and how the humans used the Message themselves to bring a new race of Nar into the world, just as the Nar had done for them—"

“Slow down a minute!” Bram laughed. “It seems to me that you're on the way to telling the whole Story yourself!"

“Go ahead, Bramfather,” Theth-theth said. “You tell it really!"

Bram took a deep breath and began. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful planet called the Father World..."

He was winding the tale down, with Theth-theth's tentacles waving in a pleasurable trance, when Jao came hiking up the slope.

“There you are!” Jao blared at them. He bent to scratch Methuselah's head and offer a palm and bared forearm to Theth-theth. “Here you go, youngster, a little something for Safepassage Day."

He produced a miniature plumb bob molded of gaily painted polysugar. Theth-theth accepted it and said, “Thank you, Jao-uncle. May I save it till later? Mama-mu Mim says I've had enough candy for now."

“Sure you can,” Jao said.

Bram took charge of the candy bob, while Theth-theth ran off to play with the other children. Methuselah scampered off after him. The two were inseparable.

“Have to do something about the way Safepassage Day runs through the year—adjust it to Haven's seasons,” Jao said. “Doesn't seem right celebrating it in the summertime, anyway. It ought to stay put."

“The children don't care,” Bram said. “They don't stay children long enough to be confused by it. For Theth-theth, it's always been a summer holiday."

Both of them looked over to where the children were playing. Methuselah was getting underfoot, but they were tolerating him. Theth-theth had a tentacle twined around the forearm of a boy wearing a touch sleeve; they seemed to be choosing up sides.

“We'll have to keep improving the hardware,” Jao said absently. “That induction cap's too bulky. Maybe something like a permanent implant ... a second-generation mediation program ... neural cloning. We can't let them grow away from each other, you know."

“No,” Bram agreed. “But the real problem is life span."

They watched the frolicking youngsters, both of them reflecting on the tragedy of Nar mortality. “We could work on it,” Jao said after a while, “but how do you keep them young without suppressing the Change? It would be like preserving a flower to keep it from going to seed. And that's what you'd have—a preserved flower."

“Well, the second generation of Nar is still a thousand years off. Maybe we'll think of something by then. In the meantime, we'll do our best for Theth-theth and the others."

“We've got to make sure that they grow up to be equal partners in whatever kind of society we develop, at the very least."

“Yes,” Bram said.

Jao brightened. “We'll work something out. At least we have this little corner of the universe to ourselves, for this hour of cosmic time, to do with what we want. Still no intelligent signals from the Milky Way, and when we hear any, it'll probably be the Cuddlies. But there's one thing I can't help thinking of..."

The summer heat and the digesting lunch made Bram too relaxed and comfortable to get really alarmed, but he knew that tone in Jao's voice. He sat up straighter against the bole of the resurrected oak tree and said, “What?"

“It's been almost seventy-five million years since Original Man began broadcasting his genes to the universe. That shell of signals is still expanding. It's reached its target, the Virgo Cluster, by now and enveloped hundreds—thousands—of galaxies..."

“Go on."

“Does the human race exist elsewhere in the universe?"

“We couldn't possibly know,” Bram said. “Not for another seventy-five million years, at best."

“There's one other thing."

Bram sighed. “I think I know what it is."

“We've been edited. Oh, just for health, intelligence—things like that. And for all we know, the Nar did a little editing of their own. We did with them, so they could eat what we eat.” He paused. “If these other human races out there were edited by their makers—what are they going to be like?"

They grinned at each other. “We'll just have to wait and see,” Bram said.